Americans love the “Made in America” label – maybe because it seems so rare. Go to any big-box retail superstore to get a bunch of bananas, a pack of Hanes men’s T-shirts and some spark plugs and it seems as if everything comes from China. And the manufacturers in the Rochester area that are thriving and growing, such as the optics makers, are in high-profit-margin/low volume niche areas. They’re not turning out consumer products by the millions – that ball is in China’s court now. Except there’s perception and there’s reality. And the reality is that less than $3 of every $100 you spend on personal goods went to China, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

The study looked at a variety of data sets from such areas as the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. And the results are somewhat counter intuitive – that despite that flat Earth global economy drumbeat one constantly hears, “the U.S. economy actually remains relatively closed (with) the vast majority of goods and services sold in the United States … produced here.”

To be sure, some of that is because services are generally locally produced – you can’t exactly import a haircut or a $900 auto repair from China. And services help account for why 88.5 percent of consumer spending is on U.S.-sourced goods and services. But even when looking at durable goods – cars, window air conditioning units, chairs, tennis rackets, smartphones, etc. – $66 of every $100 Americans spend on durable goods goes for American-made products.

And interestingly, even when buying foreign-sourced goods, most of the price tag you see on the shelf doesn’t go to that foreign manufacturer. Using a $70 pair of sneakers made in China as an example, the Federal Reserve study points out that 7.3 percent of that actually reflects the cost of the import itself, while 36 percent goes to U.S. companies and American workers in the form of transportation, the store’s markup for its expenses and profits, the cost of marketing the shoes and so on.

None of this means people shouldn’t care about how much stuff the nation imports. More jobs building iPhones in China means fewer such jobs potentially available to Americans in Caledonia. (Of course, the differering wages between American and Chinese workers are a whole other issue and we won’t even get into the question if anyone would own an iPhone if it was U.S. made and thus cost sizably more). But when looking at the rhetoric of China making everything, it’s always helpful to be able to know the nuances.

Toyota – the Japanese automaking powerhouse – employs 2,700 in the United States as it operates 13 parts and vehicle manufacturing plants in such states as Kentucky, Indiana, Alabama, Mississippi and California. And for the third year running, the Toyota Camry has topped Cars.com’s American Made Index, which rates vehicles based on such factors as where its parts come from and its assembly is done. Following the Toyota Camry is the Honda Accord (!), which is assembled in Honda plants in Ohio and Alabama. In fact, only five of the ten most American-Made vehicles come from traditional American manufacturers – the Chevy Malibu, Ford Explorer, Jeep Wrangler, Chevy Traverse and GMC Acadia. According to Cars.com, the declining use of America-made parts bumped the Ford Focus and Escape from the list. To make the Cars.com list, a vehcle must at a minimum have 75 percent of its parts be made domestically.

So how the heck does a Japanese automaker have a more American vehicle than, say, Ford? It boils down to parts content and assembly locations, according to Cars.com. The Chevy Camaro, Ford Fusion and Chrysler’s minivans all are assembled in Mexico and Canada, according to Cars.com.

All of this helps illuminate the difficulties of the ‘buy American’ philosophy. Personally, when I last bought a car – my Ford Focus in 2002 – I wanted to get something American made. But when my car finally gives up the ghost (119,000 miles on it now and still going strong, but still ….), what makes more sense? Another Focus where I help an American-based company and its foreign workforce and suppliers or, say, a Honda Accord, coming from the Marysville, Ohio, plant that sits 60 miles away from where I grew up? The multinationalism of the global economy creates autoworker jobs around the globe. It also creates a lot of gray.

Here’s something you don’t see every day – General Motors’ Tonawanda engine plant in suburban Buffalo is calling back 37 hourly workers it previously laid off as it is ramping up to export more … to China.

According to GM, the sales are to GM’s joint venture partner in China, Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp. Group. As GM puts it, Shanghai Automotive “was impressed with the quality of the engine heads Tonawanda Engine shipped them this year and they have placed another large order for Ecotec blocks, heads and cranks.”

The parts shipments are to run through 2013.

GM started its joint venture with Shanghai in 1997. And the growth of demand for autos in the booming communist country has been huge.

Does this indicate some kind of watershed moment in American manufacturing? Are the tides about to turn? Of course not. But it does indicate that there remain some areas where domestic manufacturing still has life left in it. Last week, I was at Vere Sandal Co., a sandal startup in Geneva. And while Vere can’t compete on price with cheap sandals produced internationally, co-founder Michael Ferreri said one competitive niche the company is finding is in its shipping time to retailers – they’ll be able to get product to a store in a couple of days via USPS or some other shipper, vs. 120 days coming on huge cargo ships from Asia.

There are so many ways to tell the story of western NY’s and America’s changing economy from manufacturing to services. There are the decaying empty plants that dot communities like Rochester, Buffalo and Syracuse, even as hospitals and colleges now have become big economic powerhouses in those towns. Or one just has to look at the latest list of the state’s largest private-sector employers.

Put together by the Center for Governmental Research thinktank, the list is based on the size of the full-time equivalent workforce (FTEs being this calculation that divides headcount into the amount of hours being worked, so if you have two people both workng part time 20 hours a week, that’d be 1 FTE, more or less). And you have to go pretty far down the list – to no. 17 and Eastman Kodak Co. to find a manufacturer.

Here’s the list:

1 NY Presbyterian Healthcare System 29,000

2 Walmart 28,000

3 Citigroup 27,000

4 IBM Corp. 21,000

5 JP Morgan Chase 21,000

6 University of Rochester/Strong Health & affiliates 20,000

7 Verizon 18,000

8 Cornell University/Weill Medical 17,000

9 Federated Department Stores 17,000

10 Montefiore Medical Center 17,000

11 New York University/School of Medicine 16,000

12 Columbia University/Medical Center 15,000

13 Golub Corp Price Chopper 14,000

14 Wegmans Food Markets 13,000

15 Kaleida Health 11,000

16 Merrill Lynch 10,000

17 Eastman Kodak 7,000

18 Rochester General Health System 7,000

19 Xerox 7,000

20 Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center 7,000

As CGR points out, healthcare and education as a category accounts for the bulk of the jobs on the list, and nearly twice as many as the next largest category, retail.

When I see big seismic shifts like this going on (others being, for example, the way digital technology is changing the media/entertainment/arts landscape, and the economic rise of the BRIC nations), I always wish I had a time machine to go forward 100 years and get the advantage of hindsight to see how this shakes out and see what are the unforseen positives and negatives of this kind of change. As long as I could also avoid that whole Eloi/Morlock gangwar.

I go through headphones for my iPod about every six months – the jerking and jostling of listening while running, I assume. And each and every time, I get relatively cheap replacements ($10-$12) that are inevitably made in China. On the plus side, good for my pocketbook. On the downside, those headphones have arguably cost 140,200 jobs since 2001 – including 25,600 in western New York.

That’s the conclusion by liberal think tank the Economic Policy Institute and the manufacturing lobbying group Alliance for American Manufacturing. In their report issued last month, “The China Job Drain,” the two quantify the 2.4 million jobs lost since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. The report breaks down those job losses to individual Congressional districts, estimating – for example – that China has cost 5,500 jobs to the 25th Congressional District represented by U.S. Rep. Dan Maffei.

The Alliance for American Manufacturing pins much of the job loss specifically on China’s currency manipulation (esentially, the accusation that the Chinese govt. is keeping the renminbi artificually cheap when it determines what it is worth compared to U.S. greenbacks, thus making Chinese exports extra cheap on our shelves and U.S. exports artificially expensive on Chinese shelves).

According to the report, the worst job losses were in states with big computer and electronics industries, as well as furniture, textiles and apparel. And according to the analysis, New York woes are relatively modest compared to other parts of the U.S., with California for example losing 370,000 jobs.

Freer global trade really is a double-edged sword. While manufacturing jobs are being lost domestically to lower-wage nations around the globe, we as consumers are seeing a benefit in cheaper products. The tricky question is to know when the cost of free trade outweighs the benefit. And that’s something still being debated today.

Diana Louise Carter was born at Rochester General Hospital the same year it opened and reared in Bristol, Ontario County. After college and grad school, her first reporting job was on a small newspaper in Western Massachusetts. She returned to Rochester in late 1987 to work for the Democrat and Chronicle. Carter covers agriculture and banking. She lives in the Upper Monroe neighborhood of Rochester with her husband and three children.

Matthew Daneman is a business reporter with the Democrat and Chronicle, covering imaging, optics, printing, telecommunications, manufacturing and a host of other topics. He lives in Rochester with his wife, Sheila. If he could have authentic western N.Y. chicken wings morning, noon and night, he would.

Tom Tobin has 30 years experience with Gannett newspapers as an editor and reporter. He lives in Rochester and has two children: Lia, 16, and Melissa, 11.